A primary study on text readability

There are a lot of studies on the effect of background color in the discriminability of color stimuli. In recent years, in the field of vision science some researches have been done about the factors like text color, background color, texture and etc that affect on readability. In the present work, the effect of contrast between text and background color on text readability has been investigated on a set of gray samples. To examine issue, one fixed word with two black and white colors was written on a set of different achromatic backgrounds and then was assessed by fifteen observers based on simplicity of reading. According to the results, text readability did not have a quite direct relationship with the changes of contrast between text and background. Further, in the high contrast between text and background the white text was more legible while black text showed preference of readability at other contrasts.